Inside The Score - Super Mario 64 - Ultimate Koopa / Final Boss Battle

Turtle’s Bach

Time to begin celebrating Halloween and what better than to have a look back to the times when Bowser commanded respect, especially on the apocalyptic final showdown in the brand new 3D world of Super Mario 64. As composer Koji Kondo exclaims for the relationship between Mario and music, “he is not cute, he is cool”. So no matter how wacky the characters and environments get, the music will always had that sophisticated flair that takes itself seriously. This means that Bowser, the latest development in the eternal—or at least medieval— struggle between fire breathing dragons and princesses, receives the ultimate ominous villain treatment with a powerful baroque organ rendition of the leitmotif cooked for him in Mario 64. (Even though at this point Bowser wanting to marry Peach was not explicit, it can be inferred since in the mythologies where this trope started, the dragon/serpentine monster usually abducts the princess to make her his wife as another status symbol just like the gold they hoard—or in the case of Bowser, super stars).

The hopelessness and somberness of the final struggle of the unorthodox dungaree clad hero against the dragon for the coveted princess engulfs the stage and is given the final touch with the organ piece that canalizes Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor due to its villain connotations and the church organ that represents godlike power both visually and sound wise.

Musical Analysis

Following on the footsteps of Super Mario World, the score for Super Mario 64 finds Kondo once again trying to pull off a cohesive sound by way of repurposing a main theme for different levels and the use of motifs for characters like Peach, Bowser and even Toad. The King Koopa one is composed of 4 notes that include the two most dissonant intervals; it does not get any more evil than this. The notes are: A D A G#. There is a perfect fourth, a minor second and of curse the tritone there, The diabolus in musica interval. It is first heard when Mario enters the castle in search of cake, only to be mocked and informed that the damsel is once again in distress. The music is constantly foreshadowed throughout the castle whenever Mario tries to access a locked location. Then it serves as the melodic basis for the Koopa Road track, which also features heavily the minor second and the tritone in a similar rhythmic profile before blossoming fully on the encounter against Kinga Bowser, the camera slowly panning and shaking against the steps of the huge nemesis. The Bowser song is a heavy metal track with big 80s compressed drums that transforms the motif into a series of head banging guitar riffs with codas straight from the likes of Deep Purple’s Smoke in the Water or In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida by Iron Butterfly, for sure a music style and bands that influenced Koji in his early days. These are combined with the soundtrack’s fire related Indian instruments playing diminished profiles.

That track is used for the first two encounters with Bowser. For the final one everything changes. Bowser takes on an unnatural dark color and the stage comes from a scene straight of the end of the world. The music is not a cool hard rock song but a despair inducing organ arrangement of the tune. The organ is arranged as a baroque piece with accurate four distinct organ parts meant to be the four limbs of the human body that are used to play the organ. There is a reason this is the ultimate instrument; it was actually the most complex human-made device for many centuries.

Unlike the standard Bowser cue, this piece has a long buildup made possible with tempo manipulation, creating the foreboding atmosphere right off the bat with the requiem rendition of the Bowser motif that sustains the tritone interval between the bass and the upper note as long as possible. This overture is accompanied by the echoing motif of the ethereal voice choir that was previously used as the lead instrument in Koopa’s Road. Then in pure classical fashion similar to Beethoven’s Fifth the piece takes this motif and plays with it in frantic fashion, moving its notes downwards while the organ pedals—which is where the musical term pedal note actually comes from— do their pseudo counterpoint (closer to a modern bass line in fact). There is more reliance on the sad Aeolian/Minor profiles as opposed to just the diminished ones, adding a despairing edge to the purely evil diminished profiles. Harmonically, there is an emphasis on tritone intervals and sustained diminished chords.

After sustaining the diminished chord with a ritardando, the upper voices go into a frenzy rendition of the melody originally played by the tanpura on the standard Bowser’s Theme, making out of it a mini pseudo fugue which is another of Bach’s techniques that consists in a systematic imitation of a melody beginning at different points in time (here the four voice part is cheated a little since the composer uses the pedal organ to play this melodic fugue in order to sustain the last note; yet, the part could still be played by a real organist assuming this sustain is achieved with the reverberation of the church they find themselves in). After this, it climbs back up with block chords towards another set of main guitar riff variations. This time we get real counterpoint on the lower voice since it plays the same diminished tanpura melody from the normal Bowser’s Theme. Another low voice is added for the repeat, making it a three voice counterpoint.

At the very end of the loop we arrive at the gothic induced coda of the piece where the chordal melody goes between Dm – Edim – Gdim – Dm – Dm – Edim – C#dim – Edim in a fast manner. This is now a pure Dracula climax. The piece then loops to the motif variations part but since we are now in the midst of the battle there is not a ritardando anymore.

The Bowser leitmotif or similar variations have been used inconsistently to represent the dragon turtle after its debut in Mario 64. The Kinga turtle is sometimes represented with heavy metal, other times with epic scores or dixieland jazz. Most memorable return of the theme might be as a riff in the actual song ‘Break Free’ from Super Mario Odyssey.

As a fun fact pretty much all voices from Super Mario 64 come from Mario’s voice actor Charles Martinet, including Bowser’s laugh and Boo’s Laugh—actually the same recording—which were pulled off a sample library and coincidentally were recorded by the same actor picked for Mario.

The ethereal voice sample used here is known as Lost Boy (Stereo) and comes from the Digidesign SampleCell Factory Library.